


Tomoe/Sojiro

by bricksandbones



Series: Spiral [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-20 01:05:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17612516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bricksandbones/pseuds/bricksandbones
Summary: Her cousin has a habit of making her responsible for his life choices.(Snippet of a strange, twisted Kakuriyo/DTL/Otogi fusion I’ve had brewing.)





	1. Chapter 1

She’d woken up thinking about hanging.

”How was your day?” he asked her sweetly, sliding a crisp envelope across the table. They were in some sort of fancy, overpriced coffee bar, not because it was convenient or because the coffee was good - she was pretty sure neither of them cared at this point. 

“Why am I opening your mail?” she demanded, though the logo on the envelope gave her a fair idea. He watched as she slit it open with with one perfectly-formed, oval fingernail. “Consultation for surgical biopsy. Really. You didn’t say your CT came back that shite. Well, are you going to go?” She slid the letter back across, tapping her finger against the date highlighted in bold. 

“If you’ll come,” he answered. “That annual leave you were talking about taking?” 

She shrugged. “It’s as good a reason as any.” They weren’t dealing with the news like other families. She was aware of this, but they had never been like other families. “If you need a lung, you can have mine. Ah, the smoking might rule me out, though.” 

He chuckled. “Don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions?”

“Well, if you need anything - you can have it.” 

“I know,” he assured her, giggling. “You don’t want it anyway.” That was a recurring theme in their conversations. “Wouldn’t it be ironic, though, if you’re the one who smokes but I’m the one that gets cancer?” 

“Don’t remind me,” she said morosely. “If that were the case I’d have to quit.”

He smiled. “Oh, on my account?” 

“Of course on your account, don’t be fucking coy,” she grumbled into her coffee. “Sure wouldn’t be for me, would it?” Wistfully, he patted her hand. She was always telling him off - it was how he knew she cared. Yet she never seemed to take her own advice. He knew how much she valued her cigarettes as her reward for getting through the day. He knew she needed _something_ , but - 

“You know, you don’t go to the doctor yourself,” he tried pointing out. 

“I go every month,” she retorted, although she knew what he’d been trying to say. She went under the assumption that there was nothing new wrong with her other than a creeping alcohol dependency; it had been a long time since she’d had any investigations done. “If you need parts, go to town - otherwise I don’t want to know about it.” 

“But you’re always nagging at me,” he huffed. 

“That’s because I think you really might not notice that things are wrong. I’m still giving you the choice.” 

“So, I don’t have to go?”

“You are perfectly free not to go,” she confirmed, knowing he would likely choose not to just to make a point. 

“And you won’t be sad?” He pressed.

“Why would I be sad?” 

“Because you care about me.”

She shrugged. “I want you to do what you want. Somebody’s got to be happy, and it’s not going to be me.” He knew that, and it hurt. 

“I want you to be happy,” he insisted. 

“And I want you to get better, but I have fuck all of a say in it.” She set her mug down with finality. “I’m booking that day anyway, so. Let me know.” 


	2. Kindergarten

The big people set out pieces of blank paper and some coloured bits. The other small people began to chatter and cluster in groups, guided by the big ones. He didn’t think he was meant to be part of the group - he was always alone, so he sat in the corner like he usually did. He stared at the paper, not sure what they were meant to do but certain that he was about to get into trouble. He was momentarily distracted by one of the small ones sitting down next to him. He realised that he’d seen this one before; it was the one that refused to leave him alone at the big house. It looked so different to him with its black hair and pale eyes.

“I’m going to draw you,” it told him. “So you can draw me.” It was telling him what he had to do to escape punishment. He could work with that, even if he didn’t understand what it wanted from him or why it seemed to think he shouldn’t be alone. He liked to be alone. It didn’t hurt.

He watched it pick up a brown bit and start to “draw”. He decided that he needed a black bit.

They worked together in comfortable silence.

“What’s your name?” it demanded eventually, sliding its drawing over to him. “You can write your name.” He didn’t understand. “Do you want me to write my name?” He tried to clarify. “Yeah. If you want. I’ll write mine,” it declared. He decided to follow suit, ignoring its confusing instructions.

“It’s Tomo-e,” it said, pointing out the different characters. “Mizushima Tomoe.”

He copied her. “Saionji Sojiro.”

—

Grandpa had said that she and Sojiro were cousins, after she’d met the boy at the grumpy old man’s house. She supposed he had to be a different kind of cousin from Takuma, who was always hanging about the place and seemed as much a brother to her as Hajime. Takuma was different from her brother, as egregious as Hajime was reserved, but Sojiro was _different._  It was almost as though he wasn’t human at all. He felt like a force of nature, like Grandmother, except that Grandmother smiled and her kimono smelled like peach blossoms. 

And he acted like he wasn’t human. Even in her tiny three-year-old heart, she knew that there was something very wrong with that. 

—

Daddy had called it “trouble”. It was like him, yet unlike - it felt like him but acted with a self-assurance he couldn’t feel. It kept clinging to him. It told him what to do and what not to do - he’d never experienced that before. Daddy let him hurt until he figured it out on his own. 

“It’s rude to refer to people as ‘it’,” he was informed when pointing out one of their classmates. “Akane is a girl, you know.” He learned that Tomoe was “a girl”, too. 

 


	3. Secondary

He was special. He was special, because he wasn’t human - therefore, he wasn’t a person. His schedule and accommodations reflected that: bare walls and a cold floor, hours upon hours of training that Tomoe would have called abuse, except that she didn’t understand. That was good. He was fine, because he’d been raised to be fine with it. Nevertheless, he didn’t wish understanding on anyone. 

He felt envious sometimes, because she felt just like him and he knew that she could be trained to do the same things he could. Then he remembered all the ways she took care of him. They were different, after all. She’d been showered with affection from the day she was born, and he imagined that was why she took care of him; she couldn’t bear to treat anyone differently from how she was treated. He didn’t want to lose that; he worked extra hard so that the elders wouldn’t feel like they had to make a new tool. He worked himself to collapse and let her scold him as she put him back together again. 

—

“You’ve lost weight. Again. How many times do I have to tell you, you don’t have any weight to lose?” Tomoe frowned at Sojiro’s wrist in her hand. It looked so fragile that she was afraid it would break. She wouldn’t be surprised if the only thing that stopped it was the spiritual energy that coated him like a second skin. 

“If you hold on to that too long in public, people might get the wrong idea,” he teased. 

“I doubt very much that you care,” she retorted. He was the one who had insisted on sharing her chair, though he could easily have helped himself to another. The classroom wasn’t exactly crowded; normal humans tended to leave when Sojiro came around. Perhaps it was the spirit energy. More likely, it was his complete and utter disregard for boundaries. “What’s wrong with your other hand?” He was holding it stiffly, as if trying to immobilise it. 

“Think it’s a sprain,” he said lightly. “It’ll be fine!”

She glowered. “You think? Are you a doctor? Do you want your hand to fall off?”

”Daddy says it’s fine,” he reassured her, though she did not find this comforting. “He wouldn’t let it go if it was too bad.”

”He’d have no use for you if you were disabled, you mean,” she said bluntly. “You’re coming over tonight. Grandpa’ll take you since that man’s too cheap to do it.” They’d feed him, too. She just had to address his last possible excuse. “If you have a job, I’m sure Taku would gladly take over for you. He’s been going on about how much he needs the experience.” 

“Bossy,” he accused, but he was smiling. “You’re all too good to me.”

”Isn’t that what family’s for?” Tomoe replied absently, tapping messages into her phone to set things up. She’d been indulged her whole life, and perhaps it was selfish of her to expect that her family would comply to her whims. But if they did, she was glad that she could use it to Soji’s benefit. It took less than ten minutes for all parties involved to reply in the affirmative - less time than Soji had taken to eat her second and third onigiri. She wondered if his parents actually fed him; he always seemed to be starving.

 


End file.
